Women’s Day

What did you do on International Women’s Day? Did you celebrate? We did.

African women are strong. They carry babies on their backs and baskets on their head. They also carry the burden of supporting a family and being unnappreciated and getting their behinds squeezed by strangers.

Women plant seeds. Women cook beans and rice for passers-by and they sell mangoes and air-time and single cigarettes. They make babies and take babies, when the men move on to other women. There are women doctors and teachers and ministers, but equality is a foreign concept, rooted in faraway countries that have quotas and affirmative action and McDonalds.

Because even though the women look strong and independent to me, they don’t know they are. And so they fall into early marriages and a life of toil and succumb to being used and abused. I’m not a radical feminist. I spoke to women and this is what I learned. Those who can go to university and put off the married life, do.

So on Women’s Day, a national holiday, we celebrated being women with our students at Muse School.

At first we spoke about which attributes are male and which are female. Turns out only women can be caring and only men can be intelligent. I was pleased when they said women can be smart, but soon learned that smart here means good-looking.

Then we spoke about strong women. We told them about Oprah and Rosa Parks and Rihanna (She was mine, actually. There’s a lot more to her than you think) And then we asked them to tell us about strong women in their lives. One girl told us about her doctor sister, but then one boy told us about his brother. It made me remember that they probably understand about twenty percent of what we say…

We moved to simpler modes of communication. We danced. They drummed with their God given rhythm and danced with their agile bodies. We had a professional dancer from the Ndere Dance Troupe show us some moves (I claimed I was incapable of following  because I didn’t have the proper Ugandan butt).

They’re about fifteen. But they have more curves and more flair and more womanness than I’ll ever have.

I don’t think we sparked the feminist movement in Uganda, but I did see a little change in their faces as the day went by. From nervous giggles and embarrassment their eyes filled with sincere hope, and their skin glowed with the realization that being a woman could have more to it than cooking and cleaning. An acceptance that maybe there was something to be celebrated.

Is Business Better?

 

I used to think that business was bad and volunteering was good. Clearly, the people who were going to a third world country to make money, were greedy, terrible people who were out to exploit all the children, while those who were going to volunteer were pure-hearted and would probably change the world.

Building a new power plant in Morogoro

Danya with a VIP pass:)

But then I came to Africa, and I saw people who were making money here, true, but they were also building roads and providing electricity to thousands of people. I saw people who had made a name for themselves, but at the same time provided jobs to a respectable number of people.

People who come here to work set an example and they make friends with locals and they contribute daily to the economy and to the national spirit.

Volunteer feeding child in Lushoto orphanage

People who volunteer are great, too. Don’t get me wrong – I’m one of them. But recently I started wondering who makes more of an impact,  the money-makers or the idealists, and I’m thinking the volunteers may feel better about themselves at the end of the day, but they generally don’t make as much of a lasting impact.

And besides the whole sustainability thing, I think people generally do a much better job of things when they are getting paid and when they have deadlines and a boss. Something is better than nothing, but maybe I should have come here to mine gold, instead…?

Little House in the Village

Time to put up my hiking boots and unpack my real and semi-neurotic self. The natural, day-to-day one, because it’s back to reality now, now I’m really living, not just going from one place to another in a whirlwind of excitement and soaking up sights tastes smells….

Two days ago, I arrived in Namulanda, a little village just off the main road connecting Kampala and Entebbe. It’s one of those fleeting images you capture on your way to somewhere real – the woman lying down beside her banana stand, the empty shack that resembles a barber shop, the men walking with baskets of peanuts on their heads. Except it’s not fleeting. This is my new home and where I’ll be for the next three months.

I have yet to adjust to the new pace. On the flight here from Dar es Salaam I was still in fast-forward mode, in travel-head: planning and cramming and making connections.

On the plane I spoke to a man who has a gold mine in Sierra Leone, another man with a diamond mine in Angola, a guy from the ministry of finance and then his boss – the minister of finance. Who is a woman!

My head was brimming with ideas about how I could utilize all these connections (forgetting for a moment that I’m an ignorant 21 year old pisher) and how I could make my stay in Uganda unforgettable and life-changing.

I read in my guidebook about Kampala’s must-sees, about the crazy dictators of the past and of the ridiculous homosexuality laws of the present, about the language (how the hell am I supposed to learn a new language now? Why can’t they speak Swahili?) and made mental post-it notes of about three thousand things I have to do while I’m here.

Big pack on my back, I walked into the house of the volunteers. My house. The others were just lounging around, but I was bursting! I wanted to see the village, meet the people, organize my room, get my bearings and make a plan. And eat, of course.

But then I realized that if I wanted my smelly travel clothes to be clean, I would have to sit outside with three buckets of water and soap and wash them. And if I wanted to eat I would have to go the stand and with my nonexistent money buy some bananas and beans. And if I wanted to eat the beans, I’d have to sort them and rinse them and soak them for six hours and cook them… and then of course burn them, because I wasn’t made for this stuff! I know, I like to think I am simple and down to earth, but deep down I am a spoiled brat who grew up in a nice suburb with other people doing things for her! Where are they now? I tried to figure out who I could pay to do things for me but then realized I didn’t have money. And the other girls looked at me like I’d fallen from the sky. “Why should someone else clean up our mess?”

It’s up to me now – I have to go into the immensely overcrowded Kampala to take out money, to buy a loaf of brown bread and other amenities that can’t be found in a village off the highway, go to the police-station in order to get rid of the strange looking man who’d been following me around, to tour the city and see where the Western hospital is, to sit in traffic for over an hour and say no countless times to all the people stuffing merchandise in my face (because I am white, so obviously, my sitting in the bus near the open window means I want to buy a fly swatter, a cut up jackfruit, a SIM card, a coca-cola and a towel.)

I am still “mzungu”, even though it’s a new language. And I am still getting ripped off, even though it’s a new currency. And I am still eating three bananas a day, even though it’s a new country.

Some things are the same but so many are different. A chapter ends and another begins – let’s see how many sewers I fall in this time…